SOGo repositories soon to be only for paid support customers

Nethserver development team,

Have you seen this recent announcement from Inverse?

Over the past 10 years, Inverse has been developing SOGo and providing everything (software packages, documentation, etc.) completely free of charge. A massive number of organizations worldwide have successfully deployed SOGo and benefit for free from the continuous enhancements of the software.

After many months of discussion and thinking, we made the decision to close down the public package repositories. From now on, in order to access the production builds of SOGo for various Linux distributions, you will need a proper support contract from Inverse. The options are listed here:

https://sogo.nu/support/index.html#support-plans

Payments can be made by credit card.

We hope that this move will help Inverse to:

ā€¢ increase its investments in SOGo
ā€¢ accelerate SOGo v3 evolution by adding more features (S/MIME, alternate storage backends, etc.)
ā€¢ expedite bugs fixing and small feature additions
ā€¢ invest in gravitational projects
ā€¢ extend its support to more Linux distributions
ā€¢ create a VAR channel to resell and participate in providing support
Tying up package repositories to a support agreement is important for us as Inverse strives to offer stellar support and we want to bring more value for the money to each customer. Current organizations that have a support contract with us will automatically get access to the package repositories. Official packages also offer the advantage of being thoroughly tested before they are released.

SOGo will continue to remain entirely Free and Open Source. The source code will always be fully available and we will keep using the current licenses. Nightly builds will also remain available to all, as well as the ZEG configured with the latest software.

Thanks for your support and understanding. Together, we all make SOGo better!

Iā€™m assuming you are using the sources to provide SOGo to Nethserver users? Just wanted to give you a heads up!

Regards,
Jeff Folk

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Some questions:
How will affect this decision, the SOGo integration in NS?
Itā€™s too early to put this question?

Letā€™s say that NS will not support SOGo anymore.
Will remain WebTop 4 and Roundcube.

WebTop 4 can be integrated with Samba AD but has some lack regarding Active Sync (ā€œActive Sync protocol is supported only on Android and iOS devices. Outlook is not supported. Mail synchronization is currently not supported.ā€).

Roundcube can be integrated with Samba AD ?

I will learn more about the two ā€œemail clients/groupwareā€.

Because of WebTop 4 integration in NS, I think will be the first.

A lot of articles here, about WebTop.

One of them: Webtop vs sogo thinking

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SOGo was moved to nethforge, so I guess the maintenance may go to the community.
Some time ago I read something regarding NS crew going with WebTop.

Yes, here: NethServer Modules Short/Long Term Roadmap

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If you are following the SOGo users mailinglist, you might have seen the whole discussion. Already people stepped forward to take over the creation of packages for several different distros. I hope the CentOS (6.x and 7) will be available through this too. Or should ā€˜weā€™, as a community decide to create those packages ourselves (maybe because of security risks)??

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Sogo will stay open source,
So, the NS team can still build the package for NethServerā€¦

The NS Team already has chosen: WebTop.
SOGo was moved on NethForge.

About: http://dev.nethserver.org/projects/nethforge/wiki/NethForge

Of course, the packages for SOGo can be build by the Community, by anyone who knows and wants to do that.

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Thatā€™s a hard move by SOGo guys, I hope they know what theyā€™re doing :frowning:

Regarding NethServer, building SOGo rpm packages starting from their source isnā€™t so easy AFAIK

Nethesis would like to support WebTop and not SOGo on the 7 version, SOGo is still on NethServer but modules have moved on Nethforge and weā€™re looking for new maintainers. Who wants to step up?

Honestly, I was one of the biggest SOGo fans in the past, I made the first integration and first neth packages by myself, but now I think that new ways were opened and we can work very close to the Webtop dev team (news and demo about new version soon!) in order to build a great groupware, together!

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Why not Zarafa? Or eGroupware yet more complete and versatileā€¦

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What others say about this:

http://www.iredmail.org/forum/topic11436-news-announcements-bug-fixes-switch-sogo-yumapt-repositories-to-nightly-builds.html

https://forum.zentyal.org/index.php/topic,28121.0.html

So if I understood well, the nightly build packages will still be available from inverse.
The question will be: are those production proof, and do we want to risk the situation again? Maybe inverse will decide to block the nightly build repoā€™s too somewehere in the future.
It would be nice if there will be a CentOS repo with rpm packages that has enough credibility to use for a production stable environment.

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Or Zimbra??? :smiley: I found it easy to set up upā€¦single server anywayā€¦hehe.

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Good news! I think we could try to test these RPMs, but as @dnutan said, the effort should be done by the community (of course we are willing to help!) since WebTop will be the ā€œofficialā€ groupware.

I know WebTop 5 is almost in beta stages, and I would like to hear more from WebTop developers.
@gabriele_bulfon @raffaele_fullone share with us your news: I think this is a really great opportunity to start testing the new release!

Can we access the new release and build testing RPMs? Is there a place where we can follow the development and report issue? Share your work guys :wink:

Already is :wink:

There is also Kolab, but all these groupware have a full stack (groupware + mail server) and we would like to keep working with dovecot and postfix since both have been proven rock solid.

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Hi everybody,
first I would like @GG_jr to help us understand what are the lacks regarding ActiveSync.
We have plenty of users and devices running on it on our cloud platform.
Let us know and we will check if we can fix any issue you may have encountered.

Now, about Webtop 5, at the moment it is more an alpha than a beta, but weā€™re working hard to reach a good usable state that will allow us to publish the demo to the community soon and receive all your valuable feedback.

Stay tuned :wink:

As @giacomo already said we have consider all these groupware (zimbra and othersā€¦) in the past, we have concluded that they force us to get rid of all mailserver + accounting stack and it is unacceptable.

Oh come on guys!
Here you will find a lot of friends eager to test your work :slight_smile: We love alpha! :sparkling_heart:
Be safe!

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Hi Gabriele,

First, I have no intent to blame or to discredit someone or something. Iā€™m not that kind.

When I said about the lack of ActiveSync, Iā€™ve quoated from here:

http://docs.nethserver.org/en/v7b/webtop4.html

If what is written there is true, there are issues when Windows Phones are used and of course, MS Outlook.
Because this topic is about SOGo, I tell you that with SOGo I have no issues with BB, WP, Android, iOS devices, MS Outlook, Thundrebird, regarding ActiveSync.

Unfortunately, more information about WebTop I found only on this forum and on NethServer Docs than on Sonicle websites ( http://sonicle-webtop.sourceforge.net/, http://sonicle-webtop.sourceforge.net/groupware.html, https://sourceforge.net/projects/sonicle-webtop/). So, if my informations are too old or are not so accurate, is not my fault.

As I said, I will read more about WebTop and I will test WebTop (I didnā€™t use WebTop till now). Till then, I have to trust in what I read.

In this moment I have some questions about WebTop but maybe when I will test it, many of them will have the answer.

Be sure that I will ask for help, if I will have encountered issues.

Best regards,
Gabriel

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Thanks Gabriel,
youā€™re right that documentation is still poor, and Sonicle site has even less info than Nethesis siteā€¦weā€™re working on this.

About Active Sync support, actually there should be no difference from others, as everyone is using ZPush for this. The reason we decided with Nethesis to declare a no support for Outlook, is that it just donā€™t work really well with ZPush, because Outlook expects a more complete protocol that is the Exchange protocol, while ZPush is just Active Sync only (some kind of subset of Exchange).

So, just expect to have Active Sync on Webtop to behave same as any other ZPush based solution, where not everybody wants to declare that it wonā€™t work 100%.
Windows Phones are even worseā€¦I really hope theyā€™re quickly going to disappear from the market.

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Hello Gabriele,
Thank you for your response and for the news about ActiveSync.

I look forward to test WebTop on NS7b1.
Unfortunately, Iā€™m in vacation now and I cannot to test as I want, but I will try.

I will keep you, all of you, informed about my tests and I will ask for help, if needed.

BR,
Gabriel

PS:
Regarding WP, opinions are divided and not always for good reasons.
Generally speaking, those who use Linux, are using Android or iOS and hate MS Windows and all it is related to MS. Sorry, M$ or even M$$! :wink:

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WP market share is about 2% and it seems that M$ will abandon it in favour of a ā€œcustomizedā€ M$ android distroā€¦ in any case, I canā€™t se any reason to support WP at all.

Hi Stefano,

Glad to see you here again!

After last opinions, the market share for wp it seems to be less than 1% ( Newsroom, Announcements and Media Contacts | Gartner ).
Even that, I cannot tell to our customers to not use WP, or worse, to change their phones, because the market share is less than 1% and there is no reason to support them, as email service provider.

We are not Microsoft (M$$$$$) and we cannot afford to lose our clients.
We provide to our customers full services for all kinds of equipment they have and we will continue to do so, no matter what solutions we will use (in this case, NS with WebTop, NS with SOGo, NS with Roundcube, Zentyal with SOGo, iRedMail, ā€¦).

Iā€™m sure you know the slogan that guide any service provider, especially as there is competition: The customer is always right! (in romanian: Our customer, our master!)

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